When Pierre De Bané first arrived in Halifax as a wide-eyed 11-year-old coming from the Middle East to a new, unknown home, his father remarked: “It is easier to get into heaven than Canada.”
For Mr. De Bané, who was 80 when he died on Jan. 9 at the University of Ottawa’s Heart Institute, it was a sentiment that reverberated throughout his life – and even defined it. As an immigrant who knew what it was to be “other” and as a student of law who would teach it soon after being admitted to the bar, Canada and his adopted home province of Quebec made up his heaven on Earth. Throughout the decades that followed, he loved and fought for his new home, first in his job as an aide to a new federal justice minister named Pierre Elliott Trudeau, then as the popular Liberal MP for a riding in the Gaspé and later as an activist senator who continued to work and foment even after he retired from the chamber in August, 2013.
“[My father] said that, every single day, he wanted to kiss the ground of this blessed land to thank God for the chance to be in Canada,” Mr. De Bané said in his last address before the Senate. “I did not inherit my father’s eloquence, but I certainly share his feelings.”
Kind and erudite, with thick, dark eyebrows that spoke a language all their own and a deep faith that found expression in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, Mr. De Bané could converse as easily about subjects as diverse as French poets, salmon fishing and what he perceived as Radio-Canada’s failure to serve francophone communities adequately outside Quebec’s boundaries.
He was first elected in 1968 in what was then called Matane, and the region’s residents sent him to Ottawa four more times with increasing pluralities. They loved him because he had their interests at heart and was never afraid to speak his mind. He didn’t let politics get in the way of his principles. During the 1970 October Crisis, for example, he voted against the imposition of the War Measures Act, going against his own party.
“The Prime Minister, however, never minded,” said Jim Mitchell, a former public servant and public relations consultant who was working with Mr. De Bané on an oral history of his life at the time of Mr. De Bané's death. “He was a mentor and supporter throughout all of [Mr. De Bané’s] career.”
As a young member of Parliament, Mr. De Bané toured his expansive riding in the Gaspé Peninsula by car with a trailer attached that served as his office and meeting room. Going from one village to the next, he met with farmers, fishermen and lumberjacks, with parents and small business owners who were finding it hard to make ends meet. Over the years, he turned listening into an art, a talent he took into portfolios that included Supply and Services, Fisheries and Oceans and Regional Economic Expansion.
Indeed, as Minister of Regional Economic Expansion, he distilled what people across Canada told him into one recommendation for the Prime Minister: namely, for the good of Canada’s poorer regions, the ministry itself should be abolished. They did not want to be treated as have-not cousins, or be set apart; economic expansion wasn’t the issue so much as the ability to make a living wage and support a family.
From 1982 to 1984, as the Minister of State for External Relations, Mr. De Bané played a substantive role in La Francophonie, forging relationships with his peers outside the country that would last for the rest of his life. And he put those relationships to good use as a senator, serving for 19 years as chair of the Parliamentary Affairs Committee of l’Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie.
Pierre De Bané was born in Haifa, Palestine, Israel, on Aug. 2, 1938, the second-youngest of Joseph Gabriel and Marie Geahel’s six children. His parents were French-speaking Arabs; the father was an accountant who worked for the Palestinian railway company, which was run at the time by the United Kingdom. His mother died when Pierre was 2, and he always missed not having any memories of her.
“Even in the last days and hours of his life, he was talking about her,” Mr. De Bané’s wife, Elisabeth Nadeau, said.
To avoid the coming war in Palestine, the family migrated to Canada in waves, with Mr. De Bané's oldest brother, Joseph, who had completed a degree in petroleum engineering in Paris, the first to arrive in 1950 in order to pave the way. A year later, a young Pierre landed in Halifax with his father and baby brother Paul. Soon, his two sisters, Thérèse and Roseline, arrived, to be followed by another brother, Michel, who had cared for the family after the mother died. The family settled in Ottawa.
Mr. De Bané moved to Quebec City to go to Laval University, where he excelled as a student, finally ending up in law school there, where his friends included a future prime minister named Brian Mulroney and a future Quebec premier named Lucien Bouchard.
In 1964, he was admitted to the Quebec Bar and began to teach at Laval as junior law professor. Three years later, Mr. Trudeau, with the help of Marc Lalonde, a future cabinet minister who at the time was an adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office under Lester B. Pearson, paid Mr. De Bané a late-night visit. He wanted to meet the brilliant young law professor who had already pleaded cases before the Supreme Court of Canada, an immigrant who had made the country his own, and convince him to come to Ottawa.
They talked until about 4 a.m., as Mr. De Bané continued to demur. How could he give up a career and leave a province that he loved? He wasn’t cut out for a life in Ottawa, he insisted. But for every argument he put forth, Mr. Trudeau had a rebuttal, including that the young law professor had been politically active at Laval as a student, even writing for the campus newspaper. Why not carry his ideas further, and see them enshrined into law?
Soon Mr. De Bané found himself on Parliament Hill. And in 1968, Mr. Trudeau, by then leader of the Liberal Party, convinced him to run for office. He won, becoming the country’s first MP of Arab descent. He turned out to be as fearless in office as outside of it – a trendsetter who, while his colleagues were still struggling with dictation and fusty typewriters, ordered one of the earliest Apple Macintosh computers and actually learned how to use it.
“He was such a well-connected guy in the literal sense of the word,” Mr. Mitchell said. “His hands were badly gnarled from severe arthritis and yet he remained terrifically computer literate all his life. And although he was humble, he had such insight, when he said ‘do this, not that,’ you listened.”
Among his accomplishments, after he left ministerial office, Mr. De Bané steered the creation of l’Institut Maurice Lamontagne in Mont-Joli, Que., a marine science research centre that is part of the federal Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans.
Just before he retired from the Senate, one of his last acts was to publish a study on Radio-Canada that demonstrated the failure of the national French-language broadcaster to properly serve French speakers outside Quebec. After tabling the report, he appeared before the CRTC for nearly three hours to eloquently argue his case, a reflection of the brilliant lawyer who appeared before the Supreme Court, the MP who doggedly travelled through his riding with a car and trailer – and the boy who arrived in Canada with the sense that anything was possible as long as one gives back.
Along with Ms. Nadeau, his wife of 38 years, Mr. De Bané leaves his siblings, Joseph and Thérèse De Bané; his son, Jean-Manuel De Bané; his son’s mother, Andréanne Bournival; and five grandchildren.